Integration Team
Demonstrating its commitment for a-whole-of-system approach for the New Dunedin Hospital, WellSouth has a small team (1.5 FTE) working on a project to help avoid the NDH being at capacity on day one.
This isn’t about debating bed numbers or pointing fingers. It’s about identifying logical opportunities that back the sector to:
✔ Keep people well in their communities
✔ Avoid unnecessary hospital admissions
✔ Be funded fairly for the care they provide
The team includes Integration Manager, Primary and Community Services for New Dunedin Hospital, Nick Taylor, one part time clinical advisor, Lucia Magee, and support from Integration and Programme Director, Stuart Barson.
Meet the team
Meet Nick Taylor, our Dedicated Primary Care Integration manager appointed for New Dunedin Hospital
Stuart Barson is on our Senior Leadership Team.
Lucia Magee is one of our Clinical Advisors. She has been replaced by GP Jenny McDiarmid.
Together, they make up 1.5 FTE per week working on this project.
The Integration Team including Lucia, (replaced by) Jenny, Nick and Stuart
Our Ways of Working: Lean, Agile, and Impact-Driven
12 September 2025
The Southern region is facing a sizable challenge with respect to supporting the New Dunedin Hospital (NDH). This isn’t just about aligning services – it’s about shifting how and where care is delivered and helping ensure that hospital-based capacity doesn’t become overwhelmed on day one.
The goal we are working toward is bold:
"To support a sustainable health system by enabling the shift of care from hospital to community, integrating primary care and hospital services – supporting a 30% efficiency gain in medical/surgical bed days by the opening of the NDH Inpatient Building in 2031."
To meet this goal, we’ve chosen to work differently. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to lean and agile ways of working.
Why Lean and Agile?
Because the problem is complex, and the stakes are high. Health systems are not static – they are dynamic, interdependent, and always evolving. Traditional project approaches often fall short in this kind of environment. That’s why we’ve chosen a lean and agile approach to guide our work.
With a small team and a big objective, we’ve prioritised value over volume – focusing only on the work that meaningfully contributes to our core objective.
What Agile Looks Like at WellSouth
With the support of an agile expert from within our team, we’ve embedded agile ways of working into the project framework. That means:
ü Fortnightly sprints – breaking complex problems into small, manageable goals we can deliver on every two weeks
ü Quarterly release goals – ensuring alignment to our long-term objectives and creating tangible progress milestones
ü Regular retrospectives – to reflect, learn, and improve how we work as a team – embedding a continuous quality improvement approach
ü Transparent documentation – This is a system issue to solve so we are remaining transparent about our approach, our finding and our outcomes. To see how we’re working and what we’re learning visit our website WellSouth - Integration Team.
Staying Outcome-Focused
We don’t measure our success by how many meetings we’ve had or how many reports we’ve written. We measure it by whether we’re moving the needle toward a sustainable, integrated health system. Every sprint, release and planning session is focused on moving forward toward that outcome.
Agility isn’t about moving fast for the sake of it. It’s about responding quickly to what matters most. By applying agile principles within a health system context, we’re staying flexible, focused, and ready to adapt to new insights or shifts as they arise.
What this means for the system
By working in this way, we’re not just delivering a project – we’re supporting and strengthening a system. We aim to drive a system shift toward community-based care, better coordination across services, and more efficient use of healthcare resources.
Ultimately, our ways of working are designed to serve the people and communities of the Southern region – ensuring that when the New Dunedin Hospital opens its doors, it does so with a system around it that is smarter, leaner, and more sustainable.
Setting bold goals
7 August 2025
When the New Dunedin Hospital opens in around five years, it will have 351 inpatient beds and, 20 same-day beds under a new 23-hour model of care.
This built capacity assumes: a 30% efficiency gain in surgical and medical acute bed days. The business cases for the NDH call out three critical dependencies to achieve this -– one is "new and complementary initiatives in the primary and community sector."
The primary and community workforce is already doing amazing work in this area and our job is to support and scale that. Our team are scoping how we can help avoid the NDH being at capacity on day one. We have set a goal. It’s bold:
"To support a sustainable health system by enabling the shift of care from hospital to community, integrating primary care and hospital services – supporting a 30% efficiency gain in medical/surgical bed days by the opening of the NDH Inpatient Building in 2031."
